We come into this life as an empty vessel. Devoid of meaning. We are born without knowledge. As a small human without threat. We pick up emotions, language, thoughts, and nature. We study how the world works, become a player and play. Since as a kid, we have been told and it has become a foreknowledge that we are to learn from our elders, the presupposition has rested on our shoulders to always look up to elders for ideas and knowledge. This idea has affected us to become one way in our idea that we don’t even tend to look over to the other side. We assume it’s only possible to learn from elders or people that are more knowledgeable than us on a certain subject matter.
I live with a kid of about 2 years old. She is a great kid and smart as hell. Just by noticing her, she makes me wish I had my own kid already. I’ve watched her develop in the last 10 months and she has taught me great things in different ways. She has also included in my perception that you can learn from a kid and people behind you in the game of life, not just beyond and above.
There came a point, she was fascinated about something. Her button. Anytime she wore a buttoned shirt, she spent minutes trying to unbutton it and fix it back.When she started, grandma usually called her attention back, before she was so engrossed in trying. 2 mins, 5, 30mins, she is always just trying. So I guess grandma, believing she won’t be able to do it, always wants to stop her from trying. Honestly it looks like time wasting. A small kid, trying to do something she couldn’t do. The rational decision would have been to leave her and allow her to grow up a little. Till she can handle it.I remembered there was this time, I carried her in my laps and for the whole moment, she was trying to unbutton my shirt. I had to do a lot of persuasion to stop her from trying.Believing she couldn’t and won’t.After some weeks, she sat on my lap, this time, she tried again and she was able to unbutton all of my shirt. It took her a while but she did it.In that moment, I knew her persistence paid off.
It brought me to a moment of realization on a bigger life lesson.In the game of life and in our journey, we would occasionally come in contact with some difficult problems, things we just couldn’t do great at the first instance. It takes real persistence to become great at it.I remember when my mom was teaching me how to drive a car. It was a manual car gear. I was bad at first. There are days we would get into a hot argument or what I did wrong and what I didn’t do.To be honest, In those moments, I wanted to give up.But I knew driving wasn’t that hard. It’s just hard for me because I am learning.A lot of things consist of making one great in life, not just persistence. But what it does is that, anytime you persist, you become better, failure doesn’t scare you. I hope we can learn a lot from the story of this kid I just shared.